Digg v4 was so bad that users fled to Reddit — traffic dropped 90%, and it sold for $500K

Digg was the dominant social news aggregator of the mid-2000s, letting users submit links and vote them up or down. At its peak in 2008, it drove massive traffic to publishers and was valued at $200 million during acquisition talks with Google. The community was loyal and vocal — users curated the front page by burying bad content as enthusiastically as they promoted good content. Then came Digg v4.

On August 25, 2010, Digg launched a complete platform rewrite. Everything changed: new backend (Cassandra instead of MySQL), new infrastructure, new design. But v4 launched buggy and stripped away most of what made Digg useful: the 'bury' button was gone, as were favorites, friends submissions, upcoming pages, subcategories, videos, and history search. Users were furious. A 'quit Digg day' was declared for August 30, and the front page was flooded with links to Reddit.

The exodus was catastrophic. Digg's traffic dropped by a quarter in the first month. By July 2012, monthly unique visitors had fallen 90% from the peak. Reddit — which Digg had dwarfed — grew 230% in 2010 directly from Digg refugees. In July 2012, Digg was sold in pieces: the brand and website went to Betaworks for $500,000; 15 staff moved to The Washington Post for $12 million; the patent portfolio went to LinkedIn for $4 million. Total: $16.5 million for a company once valued at $200 million. The product team had destroyed the one thing Digg could not afford to lose: its community.